The thing is that when you are engaging in something illegal, you don't want someone who opposes you to have control of the money. If the credit card thieves used the RMAH, Blizzard would have more opportunities to detect and stop it. And, most importantly, Blizzard would have an opportunity to prevent the thieves from cashing out.

It's like if you do something illegal in the real world, you pay in cash. Cash is not traceable, and a cash transaction cannot be stopped by the bank.

Similarly, I would think that most RMT operations will use their own credit card operations to cash out, rather than relying on their enemy, Blizzard.

Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut

The Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut comes out tomorrow. Hopefully the Bioware which made the first 99% of ME3 will show up.

The unfortunate part is that I have to leave town on Thursday and won't be back until next week sometime. Here's hoping I have enough time to finish all the content on Tuesday and Wednesday evening. Given my flight leaves at 7am, I'm even considering pulling an all-nighter Wednesday, to finish the game and make sure I don't miss my flight.

I do hope that the EC is good and rectifies the mistakes of the ending instead of doubling down. I would like to stop boycotting Bioware and play The Old Republic for a bit.

The Secret World

There's an old superstition that a bad dress rehearsal foretells a good opening night. Hopefully this holds true for Funcom. The last beta weekend seemed a lot buggier than the previous one. Not to mention that they disabled the Investigative quests, which are a main selling point of the game, in my view. I really wonder why they did that.

I am rather on the fence about TSW. It is very interesting, but at the same time it is a bit unpolished, and the early adopters will struggle through it.

The other thing I am not thrilled with is that Funcom is offering a Lifetime subscription. In my experience, Lifetime subscriptions just mean that the game will go F2P. Probably sooner rather than later, once the game company realizes that its most enthusiastic players are no longer paying for the game.

I think ME3 will be the deciding factor for me. If the EC is good, I'll play The Old Republic. If the EC is bad, I'll play The Secret World instead.

9 comments:

I would wager that the overwhelming majority of items/currency posted for SALE on the RMAH are likely legitimate. The problem is RMAH purchases.

RMAH combined with fraud offers the unique opportunity for illegitimate sellers to obtain goods to sell using SOMEONE ELSE's money, allowing them to undercut the legitimate market and cash out through their own channels (as you suggest). Then they can wait a week and use their own customers' billing information to buy a new DIII digital download and clean out the RMAH of more stuff to sell to future customers.

Interesting. You mean the CC thieves use a stolen credit card to buy a D3 account, transfer say $1000 to the bnet account, then use that $1000 to purchase items, then sell those items to other people.

It's a very interesting exploit. It would explain why Blizzard rushed to take the PR hit of the 72-hour delay. In addition to the credit card chargebacks, Blizzard would be on the hook for the $1000 that went to the sellers. Reversing those transactions would cause a lot of issues.

Rohan, if you're playing on PC - just open your save game directory and make a copy of the AutoSave.pcsav file once the star child has stopped talking. Rename it Save_00xx.pcsav and reload post-speech at your convenience.